At the beginning of May I moved into a condo along the waterfront in Collingwood, in a 20-year-old development known as Rupert's Landing.

I have sworn in the past that I would never live in a gated community, but once again my life fulfills Satre's comment that "we become what we resist." However, the gate appears to be broken and therefore left open most of the time, so that may not be important.

One of the most wonderful and somewhat unexpected benefits of living here is my new proximity to nature. My condo is on two storeys, facing south (so I get the sunlight all day) with a partial view of the bay toward the east. I have birch trees and red maples and a very green lawn (at the moment) to look out upon. The water level has dropped in Georgian Bay about six feet in recent years, so what was once a wave-lapped beach outside my doorstep now touches upon a reedy marsh. I would prefer proper lake water, but there's an "enviro" dimension to having this wetland nearby, and it is the presence of all kinds of birds and animals, especially migratory birds and frogs. I wake up every morning to a cacaphony from the former and go to sleep to the calls of the latter.

I have finally found a dwelling that is the perfect synthesis of home and cottage. When I barbeque on my lower balcony (which is allowed here, and yes, there is an upper balcony replete with Adirondack chairs for morning coffee or late night scotch) I'm drinking in the full-on Georgian Bay cottage lifestyle. Well, up to a point. There's still a bit more "home" feel than "away."

Actually, my new digs are very similar to the timeshare resorts to which I've been taking my kids for about a decade. The three-storey condo buildings, with their patios and balconies, are very similar to those favored in timeshare resorts. Rupert's Landing has tennis courts, a shuffle board deck and basketball hoop, an indoor pool and hot tub, a sauna, games room (with ping pong table), a squash court, a weight room with walking and cycling machines, etc., and a large adults-only rec room with big-screen TV and pool table, where drinks are served on late Saturday afternoons and where movies are screened regularly for residents. So it's more like a resort than a cottage.

I mention all this mostly because of the bird song and the proximity to nature. I can see storms developing from my large picture windows and, because I neither have nor desire air conditioning, I'm often opening windows to create a cross-breeze through the apartment. When I lived in the city I used to complain that I spent a lot of time writing and editing articles to protect nature, but I didn't spend much time experiencing it. Now I'm surrounded by it, and that inspires me when writing and editing topics on pollution prevention, waste minimization and all aspects of municipal and industrial ecology.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I enjoyed Peter Foster's editorial "The madness of eco-crowds" on the Comment page of the Financial Post section of the National Post today (May 23, 2007). I have excerpted it below. Personally, I support people taking steps to protect the environment, including the relatively "easy" climate mitigation stuff (as a precaurionary measure, and besides, some of it makes sense from an energy efficiency standpoint). But I share Foster's loathing of the self-righteous busybodies keeping an eye on one another in the English town described below. Very amusing.

Here's the excerpt:

One of my favourite books has always been Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Written more than 150 years ago by a gentleman named Charles Mackay, it provides a necessary reminder of mankind’s periodic tendency to go collectively off its rocker.

I was reminded of the book while listening to a CBC report that featured some earnest soul suggesting that the recent plummeting of a piece of marble from Toronto’s First Canadian Place might be due to climate change. Such a belief would surely fit into Mackay’s category of “the most remarkable instances of … moral epidemics [that] show … how imitative and gregarious men are.”

That is, we tend to think in herds, and the herd frequently launches itself off a cliff. “In reading the history of nations,” writes Mackay, “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly.”

Extraordinary Delusions is filled with accounts of great public manias, from the South Sea Bubble and Tulipomania to widespread belief in witches and apocalyptic prophesies. Which brings us to current apocalyptic environmental forecasts and the almost universal call for centrally directed global mobilization to “do something.” Now.

It is not that climate change is not a fact of life, or that humans may not be having a marginal impact upon it. It is not even that the science is far more uncertain than radicals claim. It is that these beliefs have come to be considered an all-consuming “truth.” Everything is suddenly seen through a climate change prism. This perspective warps the view from the highest levels of government to the smallest of local communities.

With regards the latter, another report on the CBC last week focused on a small rural English village, Ashton Hayes, which is attempting to become “carbon neutral” to fight climate change. When I heard the report, my mind went to another British reference, this time the recent British comedy Hot Fuzz. In the movie, a hotshot policeman — who is so good at his job that he makes his colleagues look bad — is dispatched for that reason to an allegedly sleepy, crime-free village that does, however, have an extraordinary number of “accidents.”

It emerges that a cabal of influential villagers — obsessed with winning the award for prettiest village in England — are not above murdering anybody who might threaten their village’s picturesque status!

Similarly, Ashton Hayes — which has become a point of pilgrimage for eco-warriers/worriers (and described by the Financial Times of London as being like a “green-tinged Lourdes”) — doesn’t sound admirable so much as creepy, with roaming teams of eco-auditors, and the application of social pressures to stop such wasteful practices as sending individual Christmas cards.

Again according to the Financial Times: “Refuse recycling rates have replaced village cricket as the jealously fought competitive sport between rival villages.” When it comes to real sport, meanwhile, the village has a carbonneutral soccer team.

Sounds like a nightmare to me, although organizers claim that there is no “finger pointing” at anybody who refuses to sign on to the eco-moralization of virtually every form of activity, from leaving on the coffee machine to taking holiday flights.

Apparently, more than 30 other British communities have joined Ashton Hayes on the Via Dolorosa to carbon neutrality. One would love to hear what the half of the village that hasn’t signed on to this mania thinks of it, and what kind of pressures they feel from their puritan neighbours.

There have been myriad examples of manias and delusions since Mackay’s book. Marxism-Leninism was perhaps the bloodiest delusion in history. It came strapped to the recurring belief that capitalism was always about to self-destruct (which makes it, not coincidentally, analogous to current apocalyptic environmental theories).

Similarly, Malthusian delusions of resource depletion and widespread starvation have raised their head with astonishing regularity in the past century and a half. Not long after Mackay wrote, there was concern that the Industrial Revolution might grind to a halt for want of coal. Petroleum has been confidently predicted to be on the point of exhaustion virtually since its first discovery. Meanwhile there have always been seers and charlatans around to point the way to salvation. Significantly, however, some of the most truly apocalyptic events of the past 150 years have been linked to following their advice.

Although believing that climate change is causing pieces of marble to fall off buildings is perhaps at the outer limits of mania, global warming is widely believed to be behind every extreme weather event, from Parisian heat waves to Hurricane Katrina.

“Men, it has been well said,” wrote Mackay, “think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

We have been here before.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've previously pointed readers toward the excellent article series by Lawrence Solomon entitled "The Deniers" and I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting the latest column below. You really should take a few minutes and read it.

The article is the 23rd in the series, each of which profiles a top highly-credentialed scientist who has doubts about the conventional wisdom about global warming and the role of human-related greenhouse gases. The title of the series is deliberately ironic, an off-hand reference to the tendency of "true believers" to dismiss skeptics as "deniers" (along the lines of Holocaust deniers).

One of the things that makes these articles so damaging to propagandists for extreme climate change scenarios is the credibility of the author. I've known Larry for quite some time, and wrote several articles for his now-defunct The Next City magazine, where I found him to be a demanding editor and a very rigorous thinker. Larry is that rare creature -- an environmentalist who also believes in free markets and recognizes the downside of many well-intentioned government programs. He's what I think of as a "next generation" environmentalist (i.e., Al Gore is the past generation, and his approach is out of date). The brilliance of these columns is that the author is not just a skeptical crank (like me!) adding to the litany of "for and against" diatribes. Instead, he's carefully reporting the facts from eminent scientists to defend the notion that the science isn't "settled" on climate change, despite what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would have you believe.

As an aside, Larry does his work under the auspices of a philanthropic entity entitled the Urban Renaissance Institute, which describes itself as "dedicated to helping cities and their regions flourish by removing the many impediments to their proper functioning." It's a division of Energy Probe, and you can read all of Solomon's writings at its website here:

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm

Sometimes I wish I could clone myself in order to create the time to research and write about different things that interest or move me. From time to time I encounter writers for whom I'm thankful in that regard, in that they sort of "cover off" an area that I think deserves attention, in a similar way to which I would do it, if I had the time. "The Deniers" fits that category very nicely and I've now taken to simply directing folks to these articles rather than debate them on some of the fine details of climate change.

This article takes on Sir Nicholas Stern, who's report calls for dramatic action now to prevent economic disruption from climate change. The article below presents a highly lucid refutation of this idea, and mentions that Stern relied on improbable and inflated worst-case scenarios to concoct the need for his drastic solutions. I agree completely with the last paragraph of this article. Enjoy.

THE DENIERS — PA R T XXIII

Discounting logic

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

If you’re the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.

If you’re not this type — and who in his right mind is — you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be — by almost any measure — the ethical thing to do.

So argues celebrated economist William Nordhaus, author of pathbreaking books and studies on global warming, and generally considered the most authoritative economist in the climate change field. His verdict on global warming alarmism, as exemplified by the UK’s Stern review, which demanded drastic measures now to avert climate change calamity later: “Completely absurd.”

The Stern review, released last year to banner headlines, argues that the cost of inaction greatly exceeds the cost of action. It has been much criticized for its selective use of data — Sir Nicholas Stern piles one worst-case scenario upon another to arrive at his fantastical costs, and Dr. Nordhaus is among those who note this failing. In fact, Sir Nicholas uses Nordhaus as a source for global-warming costs that could present themselves well after the year 2100, although Nordhaus characterized that data as particularly unreliable.

But a series of unreliable, worst-case scenarios centuries off, by themselves, still would not warrant the extreme greenhousegas prevention investments that the Stern review recommends. To make an economic case for immediate action, Sir Nicholas adjusted his model to have us paying now for potential damage that could be happening hundreds of years from now.

Sir Nicholas estimates the potential costs of climate change to be so great as to force on us a “20% cut in per-capita consumption, now and forever.” Yet his data showed low damages from climate change in the next two centuries. To overcome his data, he applied to his model what economists call a “near-zero social discount rate.” Doing so brings forward future expenses — in the Stern review’s case, expenses that might occur in the 23rd and 24th centuries. The Stern review then presents us with a tab that includes these far-out costs, and the invoice is eye-popping indeed.

But the Stern review approach defies logic, as Dr. Nordhaus illustrates by demonstrating just where zero social-discount-rate thinking leads. “Suppose that scientists discover that a wrinkle in the climatic system will cause damages equal to 0.01% of output starting in 2200 and continuing at that rate thereafter,” he explains. “How large a onetime investment would be justified today to remove the wrinkle starting after two centuries? The answer is that a payment of 15% of world consumption today (approximately US$7-trillion) would pass the review’s costbenefit test. This seems completely absurd. The bizarre result arises because the value of the future consumption stream is so high with near-zero discounting that we would trade off a large fraction of today’s income to increase a far-future income stream by a very tiny fraction.”

Moreover, who should be asked to forgo that consumption? It hardly seems fair to keep back poor countries, yet, if paid by the rich countries alone, the decline would far exceed that of the Great Depression.

Some climate-change alarmists argue that we should invest in combating climate change now as an insurance policy against the risk of future damage. Sounds prudent, until you consider the premium to be paid.

“Suppose that we suddenly learn that there is a 10% probability of the wrinkle in the climatic system that reduces the post2200 income stream by 0.01%,” Dr. Nordhaus explains, again to illustrate the Stern review’s logic. “What insurance premium would be justified today to reduce that probability to zero? With conventional discount rates, we would probably ignore any tiny wrinkle two or three centuries ahead. If we did a careful calculation using conventional discount rates, we would calculate a break-even 0.0002% insurance premium to remove the year 2200 contingency, and a 0.0000003% premium for the year-2400 contingency. Moreover, these dollar premiums are small whether the probability is large or small.

“With the review’s near-zero discount rate, offsetting the low-probability wrinkle would be worth an insurance premium today of almost 2% of current income, or $1-trillion. We would pay almost the same amount if that threshold were to be crossed in 2400 rather than in 2200.”

Dr. Nordhaus’s conclusion about such scares: “We are in effect forced to make current decisions about highly uncertain events in the distant future, even though these estimates are highly speculative and are almost sure to be refined over the coming decades.”

Dr. Nordhaus discounts climate-change alarmism, but not climate change itself. He advocates research to better understand its consequences and to develop more efficient technologies. He advocates the elimination of subsidies that artificially increase greenhouse-gas emissions, and other “no-regrets” measures that would benefit the environment without harming the economy. The costs of climate change are real, he believes, and society should act. But not overreact.

SIDEBAR: CV OF A DENIER

William Nordhaus is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is the co-author with Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson of Economics, the classic textbook, now in its 18th edition. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1977 to 1979, he served Jimmy Carter as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts and is chairman of the advisory committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I tend not to write in this space about internal matters regarding how our magzine is produced, on the assumption that readers prefer that I focus on industry issues.

However, I'm going to break that rule here because of a new development and in the event that some of you might be interested in how a magazine is physcially put together. Actually, I started out wanting to just mention a small but important change in how our magazine is produced, that will greatly enhance our efficiency and profitability -- one that speaks to how the digital revolution is changing how business is done.

When my partners and I launched our first magazine (HazMat Management) 17 years ago, we wrote or edited articles on early-version PCs. I recall orange glowing letters on a black background, and we had to navigate around in DOS code. It seems like a thousand years ago now, with today's "point and click" technology. (If you can remember ever typing "C:ENTER" you're showing your age.)

My partner Todd Latham and I used to take turns at deadline time sitting at the computer formatting the magazine in Ventura -- the state-of-the art layout software on PCs at the time. (Layout people have always preferred the Mac, and Ventura was a poor cousin to Apple layout software, but it did get the job done.) In those days, it could sometimes take us three or four days working all day and all night to finish the magazine and generate files on floppy disks, which we then took to a pre-press establishment in downtown Toronto, which would convert them to another format (Mac-oriented, I imagine) so they could be printed out as lineotype sheets, each containing a positive image of each page of our magazine.

We would then take these sheets back to the office and carefully cut out photos (that were printed as screen art) with an Exacto-brand surgical knife and, using a wax glue gun and roller, paste them carefully inside the keylines for each image. Since this was all black and white, any color ads and color photos had to be pasted into this set up as a black and white image, and then we'd write "POS" ("For Position Only") in thick black marker across the image. (At the film house -- the next stage -- the technicans would match the four-color film art with these "POS" images and assemble the film manually, using red [i.e., invisible] semi-transparent tape. Black pages were one sheet of film, and four-color pages were, naturally, four pages of film, one for each print color: magenta, cyan, yellow and black.)

Todd and I would have "iron man" contests to see who could work the longest getting the magazine to the film stage. (The things you're prepared to do when you own your own business!) I forget the record, and I forget who established it. I recall that it was me, and that it was a 36-hour shift at the computer, getting up only for pee breaks and coffee. But it might have been Todd. At that time we had an office in a house in the Portuguese part of Toronto, on Salem Avenue off Bloor Street West. I remember several times when I'd been awake for two or more days working and I'd go over to one of the local coffee shops and order a milkshake-size espresso, wait for it to cool down, then chug the whole thing in one go. If bennies had been available, I would have taken them. One time I listened to exotic Portuguese accordion music late at night in one of these shops for about an hour before going back to my desk.

After the hell of typesetting every word, image and comma, and pasting the whole thing up manually, and sending it all off to the film house, we'd go home and sleep for about 16 hours. The sales staff (led by our other partner, Arnie Gess) would get on the phone and call the various advertisers to get their artwork (film or lineotype) sent over, so that it, too, could be forwarded to the film house, and added to the layout. All this manual assembly of paper and film (and wax guns!) is impossible to imagine in the era of digital production, although to some extent ads still have to be rounded up and put in position in the final art.

I recall one time getting very annoyed with Todd about something that seems trivial now, but was a big deal at the time. After generating the film files for lineotype, the only thing you wanted to do was go home and sleep. But I always had to wait around at this file-conversion place downtown for hours and hours while they converted the PC files to the necessary format. It would sometimes take 8, 12, 14 or more hours! I later learned that this was because the establishment used Macs, so the process was terribly slow. We could have taken them to another pre-press house with PCs that could have ripped the files quickly, but this would have cost a couple of dollars extra per page, and Todd was intent on saving money. When I learned how small the savings were, and when I thought of all the timjes I'd waited from, say, midnight until 6:00 am for these files to be converted, I wanted to strangle Todd!

Another off-beat memory I have from those days was the earliest glimmerings of the digital film process. Remember, we initially generated computer files that were then converted to another format, all with the goal of printing off black and white pages to which we added cut outs of the ads and photos, and this was then shipped to the film house to be, literally, photographed. The photographic images were used to generate film, which was then used in a photo-chemical process to produced metal plates which were directly mounted on the printing presses.

The digital glimmering was this: One day I walked into a new pre-press house (one of several that we changed to, in part because we were rather slow paying our bills to suppliers in the early days!). They had an enormous new machine, with the words "HELL SCANNER" on the side. This thing was truly gigantic -- more than the height of a normal room -- and was exotic and European. It must have weighed several tons and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think the name of the machine would make a good title for a sci-fi book, but anyway, that gigantic machine performed, in those days, the same function as your little $79 scanner from Costco today! It performed the amazing new (magical!) function of scanning artwork and making everything digital. (We never made use of it, because we couldn't afford the rates at that time, so we stuck with conventional pre-press production, wax guns and all.)

By the time my partners and I sold our business in 2000 to a division of what was then Hollinger (which had just bought the old Southam Magazine and Information Group), we had already long since stopped with the old lineotype system, and actually had an internal production person who did everything via computer. (There were still a lot of glitches, though, and many late nights spent with him or her figuring our what part of our computer array was screwing up and preventing the correct output of film files. On more than one occasion we lost the entire typeset magazine to computer error -- the production person hadn't backed up the files as they went along, and so lost days and days of work!)

But even in the new Hollinger (now Business Information Group, a division of Glacier Ventures in B.C.) our assigned "art director" has had, all this while, to produce the magazine as computer files that are then sent to a film house where they're coverted (digitally) to film, which is then couriered to our printer (in Winnipeg).

So, my my mind was flooded with all these memories the other day when our publisher Brad O'Brien informed me that we're shifting to a new system for the next magazine edition -- one that uses NO FILM HOUSE! Simply put, our art director Sheila Wilson will place all ads and other artwork in the digital files on her computer, and send the whole job (via email, I imagine, or ftp site,but I don't really know) as a monster-size digital file to the printer. The printer will produce a final color mock-up and courier it to me and Brad so we can take one final look and sign off on the job before the magazine goes on press, Going this route gives us more control over the job (e.g., one less middleman in the process) and will save thousands of dollars per edition in film costs. That's tens of thousands of dollars annually that will go directly to the bottom line, and these reduced costs will boost our profitability (which, these days, is the only form of job security for us non-union folk).

I realize that I am already a dinosaur for the next generation of magazine and media grads from universities and polytechnical colleges. People starting out nowadays will completely take for granted the bleeding edge computer technology that puts everything together in virtual reality. There will be no wax guns or whiteout under the fingernails for them!

One final thought -- all of this reminds me of my own childhood and just how much things have changed in the print media world. I grew up in a newspaper family. My father and stepfather and mother and stepmother were (and some still are) newspaper writers and editors. (They were all on staff at the same time and recently remarried to one another when the old Toronto Telegram folded in 1970. My stepfather was one of the founders of the Toronto Sun, which launched its first edition on the Monday after the Tely folded on a Saturday. I still recall the "wake" my dad held at his apartment for the Tely, and some of the people there getting angry when they learned that Paul Rimstead burned the last edition at a bonfire in a park!)

In those days, the newsroom was a busy and very loud place, unlike today's quiet computer and cuble-land environment. Articles were written on ink and ribbon typewriters, and corrections were made with pencil on paper (remember those thick yellow pencils?). Articles were then (I am not kidding!) rolled into containers and sent Dr.Seuss-like by vaccum tube from the editorial department to other departments, and ultimately down to the "composing room" where technicians would read it and copy it onto printing plates ONE LETTER AT A TIME from little block letters made of lead.

This was an astonishing skill that I witnessed as a child. The fingers of these older fellows would fly as they "composed" each newspaper page in hot lead type. And remember the most amazing thing of all -- because these were print forms, every word and sentence had to be composed in lead type that read BACKWARDS!

I recall that my father Max (since deceased) was the editor of the Telegram and was famous for being able to compose "directly on the stone." Remember that the broadsheet papers in those days would have three, sometimes even four, editions per day. There would be a morning, afternoon and evening edition, and maybe one more if there was a huge news story. The Tely, the Star and the Globe and Mail fought almost to the death to get "the scoop" and I recall that it was against the rules to be a delivery boy for more than one newspaper. You were either a "Tely" kid or a "Star" kid. I never did meet a "Globe" kid!) This meant that the newspaper, and especially the front page, was constantly being updated. So, under deadline pressure and not wanting to bother sketching out a new front page layout, my dad would go down to the composing room and give direction to the print technicians, telling them to start an article here or end an column there, with the whole front page layout in his head, he'd direct them to compose the page in hot lead type on the "stone" (an actual stone tablet onto which the lead type was arranged). What an amazing accomplishment!

(I guess I come by my magazine layout trade honestly!)

Of course, as technology evolved, those old typesetters were eventually out of a job, much as I imagine a lot of the older film house staff will have to find new work or retire early these days, unless they can covert their skills with red tape and Exacto knives into skills using a keyboard and computer monitor.

Closing comment: I'm writing this Blog entry on my laptop from a coffee shop with a wireless internet connection that allows me to connect to my company's server in Toronto. The software will automatically format this entry and post it to our magazine's website. Who would have thought this possible just a few decades ago, in the era of vaccum tubes and typewriters and yellow pencils?

So, good-bye film house! You will be missed!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few days ago I posted a Blog entry and also a website news item here about a documentary from the UK entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle, which takes apart the conventional wisdom about man-made climate change.

Not surprisingly, I received emails from various folks who feel the documentary is itself a "swindle" -- a piece of propaganda for the "other side", i.e., the climate change "deniers."

I thought readers would be interested in reading a couple of the more thoughtful of these replies. I have removed the author's names not because they asked me to, but because I haven't made the time to seek their permission. One is a lawyer and one is a consultant and they are both quite well read on the climate change topic and debate. There is an excellent web link among these to a website where people who disliked the Swindle documentary list their objections.

When you're done reading these two letters, I invite you to click at the bottom of this entry to read the extended post, where I've copied and pasted Lawrence Solomon's latest article in his "The Deniers" series (from the FP Comment page in the "Financial Post" section of the National Post newspaper.) Once again, Larry has done an excellent job publicizing science that's highly problematic for the UN International Panel on Climatge Change (IPCC). It turns out that this ice core data is not as reliable as the IPCC has suggested, and other data sets may offer a better history of CO2 in the atmosphere (and paint a picture that is at odds with the IPCC version of things). The "chilling" point of this article (pun intended) is how the scientist got fired for publishing information that runs contrary to received wisdom on climate change, because it created funding problems for his employer. This whole issue of how scientists are shunned or outright fired for publishing contrarian information is (for me) the most telling thing.

Anyway, here are the letters.

Dear Guy,

I watched it. The premise of the 'documentary' seems to be that the
'theory' of man-made global warming is wrong, and that it is perpetuated
because "thousands of jobs depend on it" and "funding for scientific
research depends on it".

Some observations:

Billions of dollars in corporate profits are dependent on continuing to
emit large quantities of toxic pollutants and CO2.

The majority of mainstream media in the developed world is controlled by
conservative interests that are financially locked with large corporations.

A number of the 'authorities' in this film are highly suspect (i.e. look
at where they get their money). For example, Patrick Moore has been
completely discredited and exposed as a corporate mouthpiece for the
nuclear and the GMO food industry.

I could go on.

That having been said, there are a number of things in the film that are
clearly true. Science IS very political. There are some credible,
independent scientists who are genuinely skeptical about the link
between human activity and global warming. The majority of the people
who are up in arms about global warming have at best a superficial
understanding of the subject (people crave simple, easy to understand
answers to complex problems, even if these answers are wrong).

However, I believe that the only sane way to approach issues like this
is with an open but skeptical mind, and a consistent application of the
precautionary principle.

Net: This is a propaganda film for sure. I wonder who financed it?
Following the money is always interesting and enlightening.

In closing, the possibilities are:

1. The skeptics are right, and either global warming doesn't exist or it
is not influenced in any significant way by human activity;
2. Global warming is real and human activity is a significant
contributor to it.

If we cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions it will cost us a LOT of
money that we would otherwise spend on _________. You fill in the blank,
but I guarantee that it will not be combating poverty or some other
noble cause. In this case, if the skeptics are right, the money could
have been spent on _________. If global warming is real, our species
(and most of the others that share the planet with us) will be better
off (i.e. we may survive).

If we do not cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions, and the skeptics
are right, we will have spent all that money on ___________ and reaped
the benefits. If global warming is real, not to be too dramatic about
it, but we are screwed as a species.

To me, given the trade off, the sane course of action is clear. However,
if we don't care a fig about future generations, our generation can
probably enjoy more material comforts by plowing ahead on our current
course. And as Fred Reed once said, "Inability has always been more of a
check on human activity than wisdom."

Other commentary:

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php

Dear Guy,

The fact that I am writing this from my office while I should be practicing law (I know its almost midnight) gives you some idea that I think the attention to the "Swindle" may be a swindle.

A couple suggestions. Weigh the "Swindle" against other sources - do not accept its information as gospel (and perhaps not even as considered) - I do not think it really challenges much except the urge not to think critically.

One web site that you may find interesting is the link below that I found by "googling" climate change swindle and "debunking". I am not suggesting that it is the greatest source (I have not double checked its facts) but it does provide some counterarguments and I am not so sure that the "Swindle" producers double checked all their sources.

http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/1820

Consider:

A review of the journal articles noted in The Weather Makers adds to ones breadth of knowledge. For instance, the Science article that explains that (contrary to the, until recently, conventional wisdom) the glaciers in Patagonia are indeed shrinking.

Another thought….where are the follow ups on the swindle and is the worlds scientific community really so easily duped (consider the IPCC which included scientists from the US and Australia - those bastions of critical political thought on climate change).

I note with interest the recent American studies regarding the shrinking polar sea ice cap. It was considered obvious to all in my undergrad climatology class (20 years ago) that if there is less ice at the poles the albedo will decrease and the absorption of energy by the oceans at the poles increases. No scientific disagreement that if the polar caps melt the place will get fairly warm.

The current issue of NewsScientist reports that the near surface ocean temperature decline over the last couple years is explained away. Apparently, they changed the type of ocean based temperature sensors a couple of years ago but did not properly calibrate the new equipment to the old. So at first it looked as though the temperatures in the near surface levels of the oceans had decreased which is now known not to have been the case.

I really could go on but I have to get back to the salt mines….I probably wouldn't spend this much time but you have a good soapbox and I want to share these thoughts with you. I am not so sure that the "Swindle" will turn out to be good journalism with the benefit of hindsight.

I would bet a Guinness that in 30 years climate change and the cause is even more obvious. That said, I really do not want to collect on the bet….we can go Dutch but I will say "I told you so".

THE DENIERS — PA R T XXI

The ice-core man

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Once upon a time, and for millennia before then, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were low and stable. Then came the industrial revolution and CO2 levels began to rise. The more man industrialized, the more that CO2 — and the temperature — rose. In the last half century, with industrialization at unprecedented levels, CO2 reached levels unprecedented in the human history. This is the story of global warming.

This story is a fable, says Zbigniew Jaworowski, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Environmental Program, and current chair of the Scientific Committee of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw.

Dr. Jaworowski agrees that CO2 levels rose in the last half century. Starting in 1958, direct, real-time measurements of CO2 have been systematically taken at a state-of-the-art measuring station in Hawaii. These measurements, considered the world’s most reliable, are a good basis for science by bodies like the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the agency that is co-ordinating the worldwide effort to stop global warming.

But the UN does not rely on direct real-time measurements for the period prior to 1958. “The IPCC relies on icecore data — on air that has been trapped for hundreds or thousands of years deep below the surface,” Dr. Jaworowski explains. “These ice cores are a foundation of the global warming hypothesis, but the foundation is groundless — the IPCC has based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false.”

Ice, the IPCC believes, precisely preserves the ancient air, allowing for a precise reconstruction of the ancient atmosphere. For this to be true, no component of the trapped air can escape from the ice. Neither can the ice ever become liquid. Neither can the various gases within air ever combine or separate.

This perfectly closed system, frozen in time, is a fantasy. “Liquid water is common in polar snow and ice, even at temperatures as low as -72C,” Dr. Jaworowski explains, “and we also know that in cold water, CO2 is 70 times more soluble than nitrogen and 30 times more soluble than oxygen, guaranteeing that the proportions of the various gases that remain in the trapped, ancient air will change. Moreover, under the extreme pressure that deep ice is subjected to — 320 bars, or more than 300 times normal atmospheric pressure — high levels of CO2 get squeezed out of ancient air.”

Because of these various properties in ancient air, one would expect that, over time, ice cores that started off with high levels of CO2 would become depleted of excess CO2, leaving a fairly uniform base level of CO2 behind. In fact, this is exactly what the ice cores show.

“According to the ice-core samples, CO2 levels vary little over time,” Dr. Jaworowski sates. “The ice core data from the Taylor Dome in Antarctica shows almost no change in the level of atmospheric CO2 over the last 7,000 to 8,000 years — it varied between 260 parts per million and 264 parts per million.

“Yet other indicators of past CO2 levels, such as fossil leaf stomata, show that CO2 levels over the past 7,000 to 8,000 years varied by more than 50 parts per million, between 270 and 326 parts per million. We also know that there have been great fluctuations in temperature over that time period — the Little Age just 500 years ago, for example. If the icecore record was reliable, and CO2 levels reflected temperatures, why wouldn’t the ice-core data have shown CO2 levels to fall during the Little Ice Age? ”

Dr. Jaworowski has devoted much of his professional life to the study of the composition of the atmosphere, as part of his work to understand the consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear-weapons testing and nuclearreactor accidents. After taking numerous ice samples over the course of a dozen field trips to glaciers in six continents, and studying how contaminants travel through ice over time, he came to realize how fraught with error ice-core samples were in reconstructing the atmosphere. The Chernobyl accident, whose contaminants he studied in the 1990s in a Scandinavian glacier, provided the most illumination.

“This ice contained extremely high radioactivity of cesium-137 from the Chernobyl fallout, more than a thousand times higher than that found in any glacier from nuclear-weapons fallout, and more than 100 times higher than found elsewhere from the Chernobyl fallout,” he explained. “This unique contamination of glacier ice revealed how particulate contaminants migrated, and also made sense of other discoveries I made during my other glacier expeditions. It convinced me that ice is not a closed system, suitable for an exact reconstruction of the composition of the past atmosphere.”

Because of the high importance of this realization, in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be “immoral” if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.

The refusal did not come as a surprise. Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article published by the Norwegian Polar Institute, Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute’s director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that “this is not the way one gets research projects.” Once published, the institute came under fire, especially since the report soon sold out and was reprinted. Said one prominent critic, “this paper puts the Norsk Polarinstitutt in disrepute.” Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski’s science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.

Is there an alternative to ice-core samples, which are but proxies from which assumptions about the historical composition of the atmosphere can be made? “Yes, there are several other proxies, and they lead to different findings about CO2,” Dr. Jaworowski states. “But we don’t need to rely on proxies at all.

“Scientists from numerous disciplines have been examining CO2 since the beginning of the 19th century, and they have left behind a record of tens of thousands of direct, real-time measurements. These measurements tell a far different story about CO2 — they demonstrate, for example, that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have fluctuated greatly, and that several times in the past 200 years CO2 concentrations have exceeded today’s levels.

“The IPCC rejects these direct measurements, some taken by Nobel Prize winners. They prefer the view of CO2 as seen through ice.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)